| ASRL / PERPETUAL 2013 |
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| Sending and Receiving | ||||||||
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Daniels, Dieter (translated by Grentz, Henning) | ||||||||
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Radio is not a word but a prefix. It denotes something that emits radially: from one point to many, carried by electromagnetic waves. According to the intentions of its inventors, radio transmission ought to deliver a signal from a transmitter to one single receiver. But despite all efforts they cannot mold the Hertz waves to fit into the concept of cable connections: the signal would always reach more receivers than it was supposed to. Thus, the military becomes concerned with the secrecy of their radio messages. At the same time, this circumstance delights the radio amateurs who devotedly listen to everything their homemade apparati allow them to receive way before actual radio programs emerge. These craftsmen and amateurs form the basis of the unexpectedly developing radio boom starting in 1920, which creates a medium nobody had planned. The same happens again in the 1980s when hackers, being the first private users of the global computer and telecommunications network, represent the forerunners of the Internet boom of the 1990s. Indeed, radio - and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media - is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp's famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: "Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias." And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.
"…to feel at home in the surge, in the motion, in the fleeting and infinite. Not to be at home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be in its center and to be concealed from it." These words may serve to describe the listening experience that would fascinate so many from the time of the amateurs to the beginning of radio. Yet they come from Charles Baudelaire and relate a flaneur's experience in the anonymous mass of a modern metropolis, "from this universal communion he gains a unique sort of inebriation."(1)
The poet is a particularly sensitive receiver who by creating poetry becomes a sender himself. He bridges the centuries in the same way as it is depicted by Baudelaire's marine metaphor of "Lighthouses" signifying intellectual authorities that send each other signals through the ages. What if the "universal communion" turned into a universal communication? Many a time Baudelaire meets Baudrillard back to back on the shelves of a well-arranged private library. But beyond all alphabetical alliterations, premonition and abgesang of the sender's power meet when Baudrillard writes in his "Requiem for the media": "In the symbolic exchange relation, there is a simultaneous response. There is not transmitter or receiver on both sides of a message: nor, for that matter, is there any longer any 'message'. [...] Thus, the receiver (who in fact ceased to be one) intervenes here at the most essential level" by a "subversive reading" of the transmitter.(2) It is exactly one such subversion of the broadcaster's power through the receiver that 20 years before Baudrillard had been undertaken by John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape No.4": 24 performers convert 12 radios from reception to production devices. Something quite similar had already been done with record players in the 1939 piece "Imaginary Landscape No.1." The transformation of a receiving device into a source of continuous original production has become an everyday aspect of mass entertainment in the era of the Techno-DJs. "Do you remember your thinking at the time?" Cage is asked. "Yes, my thinking was that I didn't like the radio and that I would be able to like it if I used it in my work. That's the same kind of thinking that we ascribe to the cave dwellers in their drawings of frightening animals on the walls - that through making the pictures of them that they would come to terms with them."(3) It seems as if media and machines have replaced wild beasts in the way they are depicted in art and literature of the 19th and 20th century: dangerous and fascinating, they cannot be conquered by the individual but are at the same time indispensable for the nutrition of the whole of the entire human society. The hoard of those, who are avantgarde fighters in the field of media and machines, is as purely male by definition as any prehistorical group of animal hunters. One of the most famous wild beasts is Herman Melville's "Moby Dick". Here, the danger lurks in the deep - of the soul and of the sea - and both confront each other in such a dramatic way that the book becomes a world success. The metaphor of wild nature is replaced by technology in Melville's almost unknown fantastic narration "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" of 1852. It describes a bizarre world that comprises nine bachelors and a large machine, which is operated by lonely, freezing virgins and produces some sort of spermatozoid liquid from old clothes. Jean Suquet pointed out that the narration constitutes a counterpart to the "Bachelor Machine" of the Large Glass. Both agree even in details such as names and numbers, even though it is certain that Duchamp had never read Melville.(4) It may seem almost natural that all radio amateurs and computer hackers of the 20th century are true bachelors. They are "amateurs", i.e. lovers in the proper sense, who already get confused by the fact that with the opening up of their domain to a mass audience women might now be present on the air and on the Internet, respectively. This way, the previously celibatic purity of technology is sacrificed, making space for a playground of media-erotomaniac identity games that are based on the technical ambivalence of distance and proximity. But in the depth of language the secret goal of all hackers is buried: The "matrix" is the net of all nets and at the same time it is the mother's womb. The painful rebirth of Neo alias Keanu Reeves into the real world as shown in the movie "The Matrix" (1999) offers the best visualization of this double meaning. Perhaps, the ultimate goal of all those hackers, amateurs and lovers in regard to their media could be compared to Paik's "Danger Music"(5) for Dick Higgins: to crawl into the vagina of a live female whale in order to become one with what separates them from the world - thereby, without being explicitly sexual, reinstating the prenatal experience of absolute seclusion in a man-made natural environment. But alas, there is no escape: ultrasound will detect the embryo in a mother's womb as well as the whale in the depths of the sea. Technology advances into realms that previously were considered unknowable and therefore remained in the unconscious mind.
Like submarine commanders in the sea of the unconscious, bachelors of all ages and media send out signals through their machines, without even knowing that by doing so they are but trying to reach prospective brides. Though, strategically they seem just as helpless as the submarine Cage's father, an inventor, had constructed. Cage compares his father without hesitation to Duchamp in that they were both "bricoleurs".(8) The submarine, however, was never put to service in WW I, because it could be detected too easily due to the bubbles that would rise from it. This is why "… and bubbles on surface" is frequently heard from Cage in his readings and writings. Thus is the state of the subconscious that it is nothing but a sunken cultural asset lurking deep down on the bottom of common sense where we can detect it through bubbles on the surface of the media.(9) Today, the last adventures in an overly well-known world await the surfer in the depths of the Internet. He dives deep into the waves of the information tide, as did the radio amateurs who would lose themselves in the global waves of the ether. Only rarely he surfaces to obtain the bare necessities for survival from the world of "ready-made" goods.(10) The ever-identical object from the world of mass-produced goods becomes obvious only through the attachment of a pseudo-indivduality to a single "ready-made" object. In the same manner, the world of "radio-made" information becomes distinguishable from static only through the random selection of a single one out of many signals. Since the appearance of "ready-mades", producing and presenting as the basic principles of mass production have become as dubious as sending and receiving have for media technology since Cage's "Imaginary Landscape No.4". George Brecht follows Cage's path with his "Candle piece for radios" and the concept of "listener as virtuoso".(11) But aren't even the songs of whale recorded, as if they were messages encoded for us humans? Whenever a signal is sent man thinks it happened on his behalf.(12) Certainly, the spiritualistic medium of occultism has - in part - been inspired by "wireless" technology. Yet it remains a pre-technological model, even if the shortcut between sender and receiver in a psycho-technology of make-beliefs may be comparable to the collaps of the sender-receiver model in the mass media according to Baudrillard.(13) But it is the privilege of artists to transcend the division of sender and receiver without losing their credibility. Thus, claims Duchamp, artists play a "mediumistic" role allowing the worth of a work of art to remain "completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist. [...] All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."(14) The work of art reaches the viewer like the signal reaches the listener, like the sonar reaches the whale.
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